


Hoping Winter Never Dies

by YukiRiikus_Reading_Room



Series: Change of the Seasons [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Hurt, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Implied Relationships, Implied Sexual Content, Implied Slash, Internal Conflict, M/M, Memories, Natasha Feels, Other, Past Brainwashing, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Past Relationship(s), Red Room, Steve Feels, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-07
Updated: 2013-09-07
Packaged: 2017-12-25 21:16:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/957691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YukiRiikus_Reading_Room/pseuds/YukiRiikus_Reading_Room
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Steve Rogers wants is to get his best friend back, to pull him out of his Winter Soldier persona and back into the Bucky Barnes he knew and loved.  She won't say it, but Natasha hopes that never happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hoping Winter Never Dies

When the Avengers finally managed to bring the Winter Soldier into custody, it only took Steve Rogers about ten minutes to realize this broken shell of a man was far from the charming, loving Bucky he’d mourned for so long. 

He might have been back in body, he told Tony one night when the billionaire found him camped outside the observation window watching specialists try to break through whatever had been done to Bucky’s brain by the Red Room, but it was easy for everyone to see he wasn’t the same person Steve had been telling them stories of fondly for almost a year.  For the rest of the team, Bucky was the man who’d saved Captain America’s ass more times than he could count before he had the muscles to take care of himself, who’d spent entire paychecks on medicine for his sickly best friend when he couldn’t afford it, who’d learned to sew so that he could fix the holes in their already threadbare clothes while Steve attempted to cook them dinner with the few meager ingredients they could afford between the two of them after they moved in together.  He was the reason Steve had wanted to join the army in the first place – to protect the man who’d always protected him, a dream that soon morphed into a desire to protect everyone too weak to protect themselves.  He’d shown Bruce the letters and scribbled drawings he’d sent Bucky after he’d gone away to war without him, and the single photo he had of them at Coney Island taken the day before Bucky got the idea to volunteer for the army in the first place.  Watching the captive Winter Soldier scream and thrash in an inhuman display of rage, Steve began to wonder if this man had ever been his best friend, or if everyone was somehow mistaken.  This, he often thought to himself as he blinked back tears as ‘Bucky’ yet again proved he had no memory of their flat in Brooklyn or the time he’d drunkenly tried to teach Steve to dance on their fire escape, couldn’t possibly be the man he would have once gladly given his life to protect.

The mutilated shell of his former best friend, so close and yet inexpertly far away when it came to their shared memories, was like a taunt to Cap.  It was a reminder that he hadn’t been strong enough once to save him from the enemy, and that now he wasn’t strong enough to save him from himself. 

But this version of Bucky?  This assassin with a metal arm and more battle scars than Steve could even process?  This was who Natasha knew him as, not as the brash and quick to joke New Yorker, young and ready to set out to defend his country. 

She’d only ever known him as the Winter Soldier, the man she’d fallen in love with in a place and time when it never should have been possible.

She’d gone by Natalia when they’d found each other after the Red Room had had its way with the pair of them.  They’d been partnered on several missions that were executed perfectly, though after each one they’d swear they’d never work together again – she was too controlling, he was too erratic, but at the end of the day they both had to admit they worked well together.   They hadn’t meant to fall together the way they did – she’d tried so hard to stay away from him, she knew getting involved with another assassin would make their superiors flag them as possibly defective models unfit for fieldwork – but in the end she hadn’t been able to resist his biting smiles or sharply tuned wit, the way he looked at her like going to bed with her would be the single greatest mistake he’d ever made and would gladly play the price for a hundred times over if only given the opportunity.  All the tension they’d been trying to overlook between them finally came crashing down around him when she took a bullet in the shoulder for him knocking him out of the line of fire. 

That night he’d come to her tent where she’d been resting, tired and still sore under her bandages, and sat on the edge of her cot holding her hand without saying a word.  It was the foreign look of concern and affection on his face that sealed it for her.  She’d never thought she’d see him look at anyone with such a look of compassion, and the fact that he’d given it to her was what convinced her to lean forward and pull him into a kiss.  After that, there was no stopping them: his fingers clutched in her hair, her lips against his shoulder neither sweet nor kind as she bit into him, the quiet slide of her legs over his as he pulled her down on top of him and ran his hands over her back.  It hadn’t been perfect, and often they still wanted to kill each other and argued over the proper way to perform their joint missions, but at the end of the day when she crawled into his bed she knew there was no one else she would want to be with.  At the end of the day, he made her feel like she still had a heart.  She’d long come to believe she didn’t have one anymore after all the terrible things she’d done, but with Bucky, she was almost convinced that she did. 

She’d never known him whole, like Steve, but that didn’t matter much to Natasha.

She wasn’t sure she’d ever been fully pieced together in the first place, and the broken pieces she and Bucky had learned to love each other with had been a tighter fit than any love she could image having now.  There’d been something about his brokenness that fit her own so well that now she couldn’t even try to love someone who was whole.  Their sharp edges and wounded memories laid flush with each other, hip to hip, her soft frown against his so often condescending smile.  That was how she loved him: with their pain fully present, and a little bit of it thrown into every moment of passion. 

Maybe it hadn’t been the healthiest thing, or the smartest, but their love had been exactly what she’d needed before she was unmade again, before Nick Fury found her and let her be her own woman instead of a deadly poisoned pawn. 

When Steve gave up each night and went back to his quarters to get some sleep before their missions in the morning and everything was quiet in the helicarrier, Natasha would sneak out of her room and hurry to the Winter Soldier’s bedside.  He was often too heavily sedated to know she was there, let alone feel it when she took his hand in hers or pressed her lips gently to it.   Sometimes she held his metal hand, reveling silent and alone in her memories of his hard-edged chill pressed against her skin during hot nights. 

Every single day, she knew Steve and the others were working to find a way to get Bucky Barnes back to the way he was before he’d fallen from that train into the snow, but even seeing Cap’s pain couldn’t convince her to hope for his sake that they’d succeed. 

If they did, he’d go back to being Bucky, and the man she loved would be gone except in looks.  Either way, she or Steve would have to live without the man they cared for so much.  The only thing standing between her and pain was the already unmade mind of a master assassin, and selfishly, she hoped he never found his way back. 


End file.
